Background on RAIS
RAIS was initially developed by UNHCR Jordan in 2009 to address the demands for a more coordinated approach by partners delivering refugee assistance. In 2009 refugee assistance targeted Iraqi refugees and included healthcare, education, and material assistance packages. Following its success in Jordan, RAIS was later rolled-out in Lebanon and Syria as part of efforts to share ‘best-practices’ across the region. In 2012 a review of the system and current operational needs was conducted which led to the release of RAIS v2. In 2014 new modules were incorporated into RAIS including the vulnerability assessment framework, assessment management, and offline functionalities. In 2015 RAIS continued to enhance with additional modules for assistance coordination, referrals and ticketing.
RAIS is now the main coordination tool for assistance delivery in countries across the region (Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq). Over 200 partners are now actively using RAIS which represents over 500 individual users. Since June 2014, 150,000 Home Visits have been recorded on RAIS, and there are over 7 million assistance records corresponding to 1.5 million beneficiaries. New data exploration tools are now under development and RAIS will continue to be scaled-up across the region and beyond. Interest in RAIS has also been expressed by a number of other country operations such as Ecuador, Libya, India, Israel, Kenya and Yemen. In addition a number of key donors have made its use mandatory as part of their donor agreement with partners, independent of whether or not their funding goes through UNHCR.
